Read a Book You Idiot

By on December 20, 2010 ·
Banned Books #4
Image by ellen.w via Flickr

I work with a kid who just turned twenty-one and he’s an idiot. Don’t get me wrong, he’s a sweet kid, just an idiot.  I’m a long way out from twenty-one and I understand that old guys are always going to think young guys are stupid. This is the way of things.  But this kid claims he’s never read anything by Shakespeare. I’m not a literary snob who thinks you should only read the classics, but how can you get to twenty-one without reading anything by Shakespeare? I thought everybody who had a high school diploma would have to at least read Romeo and Juliet.

I made a joke about Doublespeak and he had no idea what I was talking about. Not only had he not been taught any Shakespeare but he hadn’t been taught 1984. Had never even heard of it or George Orwell for that matter. Again, I don’t think everything you read has to be ‘important’, but in my opinion 1984 is a top contender for most important novel of the twentieth century. Plus it’s just a good book.

If this kid is to be believed, he hasn’t been taught any books of any kind in school. That’s hard to buy, but even if true it’s not the real issue for me. That’s a failure of the public school system but it’s not a failure you have to live with. Just read a damn book.  I don’t get how people can’t grasp the concept of reading on your own and this kid is not the only person I’ve met with this problem. I won’t take any excuses on the matter. I don’t care if you weren’t taught any books in school. I don’t care if you had a teacher who hated you or who was criminally boring or who made you read a book you hated. Now’s the time to read what you want.

You should definitely be reading for pleasure, maybe even guilty pleasure. You should also be reading books that move you and deal with important issues. You should occassionally read books that are challenging or above your head. Just because someone is smarter than you doesn’t make you stupid. Stupider than the author maybe but drop your ego and you might learn something. Reading books that fulfill more than one of these functions is one of life’s true joys.

I talked about this with a friend of mine who teaches English (and contributes to this blog)  and he said he started giving students booklists. But which books?  What books would you put on a list for a person who claims he’s never read anything? They would have to be books that have some of the big ideas going on. Literature in other words but it would also have to be an engaging read. It would need to be a good story that you can’t put down and may feel the need to read more than once. It would help if the book was infectious. One of those books you make excuses to quote or talk about and feel like you have to pass along.

And how long a list? My friends are all readers and I’m sure each of us could come up with a list of fifty ‘must reads’ without trying hard. That number may be too daunting for a novice reader though. In fact I think a top ten list is too many. I think five is a good number and I think I’m gonna make a five book reading list. I’ll ponder it for a bit and make that my next post. I am of course open to suggestions in the comments.

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When Will You Make an End of It…?

By on October 25, 2010 ·
Sisyphus, 1920
Image via Wikipedia

…When I am finished, of course. 

When you start delving into the process of writing you’ll very quickly find some famous writer who talks about not being in control of his story.  The story tells them what to do.  Maybe they just start writing with no idea what’s going to happen or how it will end.  Maybe the characters start doing and saying things that surprise the author.  Someone who doesn’t write or even a beginning writer could be forgiven for thinking that’s a lot of crap.  I mean after all, how could you not know?  You’re the only one in there, hunched and muttering over your keyboard.  You made up the characters and the world they inhabit.  How could you not know? 

Well on some level, a little below consciousness perhaps, I’m sure you do know.  But when you have that first experience of the Muse (or whatever) taking over it’s pretty fun.  Weird, a little creepy even, but fun.  It feels like you’re really tapping into that Storytelling juice and it makes you feel like a real writer.  It’s not all in the plus column though.  If the story controls you and tells you what to do, you have to listen to it.  Even if you don’t agree with it. 

I’ve been working on what I though was a simple little short adventure story for…like…ever man.  I write every day (pretty much) and it feels like I’m getting somewhere but it keeps not being done.  Every two weeks I meet with my writers group and I say, “I’m almost done.  Should have it next time.”  Eventually they just give you Looks.  You can’t quantify it either.  First it’s 80% done.  Then 90%.  95%.  97.5%.   98.789%.  I could even live with 99%.  That would be close enough that I would just lie and say I’m done.  Ah, well.  As problems go I guess it’s better than writer’s block. 

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The New Archetypes: Part 5

By on September 27, 2010 ·
Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Sile...
Image via Wikipedia

Until now the archetypes I’ve talked about have been heroes.  Well technically some of them like the Rogue Cop and the Assassin are antiheroes but they’re all the protagonist.  So how about a little love for the villain?  In ancient myth the hero’s opponents are often pretty simple monsters, a dragon or a cyclops.  But the need for character makes the best villains more interesting.  Grendel isn’t exactly a fully fleshed character by modern stories but he does have a backstory and a mother and even though there’s no doubt they’re the bad guys the poet gives us a sense of theiry struggle and pain.  In modern stories we have a bit of a problem though.  Most people don’t wake up to go fight monsters, or at least not fantastical ones.  The cops don’t get a whole lot of calls for minotaurs running around.  There are of course human monsters; genocidal heavies like Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin.  Story wise though these are army versus army type affairs.  Most of the grunts who (heroically it’s true) took fortress Europe never set eyes on Hitler.  But in a smaller, more personal story we need a more personal villain and we’ve got one who shows up a lot.

The Suave Pshycopath.  It’s true that the Suave Pshycho is evil.  He may be the head of a criminal organization or perhaps a serial killer.  But man is this guy urbane!  He’s most likely very well spoken with impeccable manners.  It’s quite likely that he listens to a lot of classical music and can definitely quote Shakespeare as well as more obsure poets.  If circumstances permit (he’s not in prison) he’s well dressed and a gourmande.  He’s probably a handsome chap.  And yes he’s pretty much always a he.

The prototype for the Suave Pshycho is probably Professor Moriarty from the Sherlock Holmes stories.  Holmes is urbane, witty, upperclass and has a keen mind versed in a wide range of topics.  And so his archrival must be of a similar type.  A professor of mathematics with a keen mind that in this case is turned toward the building and running of an extensive crime syndicate.  Plus they’re both British so you know they’re terribly polite. 

Despite his ruinous hatred of the Great Detective though it might be argued that Moriarty is not truly psychopathic.  There are other examples, the Bond villains tend to fall into this type, Hans from Die Hard is another but we all know who the gold standard is.  Hannibal the Cannibal.  Dr. Hannibal Lecter.  He is a monster.  His own doctor says so.  He lives in a dungeon, a cave worthy of any monster out of myth.  Yet he’s soft spoken.  He’s polite.  He sketches.  He even has perfect posture.  He’s charming and in fact he’s fascinating.

And that’s the whole point.   When we have to look for our monsters in ourselves we don’t like what we see and we shouldn’t.  So maybe we make it look a little better.  Good looking on the outside but also someone who you’d like to invite to a party.  Someone who excels at dinner conversation.  Why?  Well here’s where it gets complicated because I think it’s more than wanting to take the sting out of the monster’s actions.  Lecter is brilliant and sophisticated but that makes him more terrifying, not less.  He’s not a foul smelling schizophrenic talking to himself in an alley.  None of us would go into that alley but most of us would be thrilled to be invited to Dr. Lecter’s house (before we knew about all his hobbies). 

When the Pshyco is suave we can’t tell friend from foe.  A frightening thought by itself but there’s also the horror of knowing him afterhis true nature is revealed.  All the times you were alone with him in his office.  Maybe you helped him pick out a credenza for his well appointed study.  Maybe you went on a date with him.  And that’s the other side.  We make the Suave Pshycopath charming so we can talk to him but it also absolves us of guilt.  How could anyone have known?  He was the perfect gentleman! 

And for some reason they are gentlemen.  The closest female equivalent I can think of are the great femme fatales in noir.  They’re dangerous, smart, and fascinating but they’re not quite the same.  For one thing, their allure is usually overtly sexual and the Suave Psychopath tends to use a gentlemanly charm that lacks sexual menace (Patrick Bateman from American Psychobeing a notable exception).  And the target of the femme fatale usually has a good idea she’s trouble, he just can’t help himself (usually because of the aforementioned sexuality). 

Of course when the Suave Psychopath is a serial killer is when he’s most modern.  If the serial killer isn’t wholly a product of the modern age his proliferation certainly is.  So are many of the investigative techniques that law enforcement use to track and catch them (in fact FBI Profiler is almost an archetype).  Despite the monstrous, heinous acts of these defective humans and the workmanlike way that cops catch them; we want to glamorize.  If you don’t believe me consider Saucy Jack.  A real serial killer who in retrospect shadowed cases to come.  Modern profiling techniques suggest that the Ripper was a man poorly educated, barely literate, whose first language was probably not English, had a deep resentment/hatred for women, lived in the area where the murders took place, was a poor working class man (perhaps a butcher), and it was likely the police had interviewed him but not charged him.  Yet still movies portray a handsome man in evening dress, top hat, cape, and white gloves that will soon be red with blood. 

Whether it’s the allure of the dark side of human nature or the wish to ignore the mundane aspect of murder and death I’m not sure.  It’s poor police work but the good news for Storytellers is it makes a great character.  Actors don’t want to play mustache twirlers and audiences don’t want to watch them.  But a well done Suave Psychopath is impossible not to watch.

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The New Archetypes: Part 4

By on September 13, 2010 ·
Shane Hong Kong Premiere Booklet 1953 P1309907

I’ve been talking about how the modern storytelling of movies has given us archetypes that are also uniquely modern.  Modern they may be but they still tend to follow classic Hero journeys.  A Rogue Cop is still our good guy and must still defeat the bad guys.  The Nobody will travel on a journey of discovery and emerge changed in the third act, hopefully for the better.  But there is a modern archetype whose story arc goes backwards.

The Retiree.  The Retiree as his name implies is at the end of his career or no longer in the line of work.  Whatever this line of work was it was dangerous or illegal or both.  The Retiree has probably enjoyed great success in theline of work even if that success is simply measured by the fact that he’s still alive.  The Retiree in many cases probably never thought he’d make it this far but now that he has he wants to get out of the field.  Older, wiser, past his prime and fully aware of it he dreams of different life.  A safe, normal life where he can forget about his past and grow old like everyone else.  At this point one of two things happens.  Either The Retiree has ‘just one more job’ before he can realize his dream or his retirement is interrupted because he gets ‘pulled back in’.

We might as well get right to Shane since it’s one of the first, one of the best, and pretty much the template.  There were definitely men in the Old West who made their entire living with their gun.  They were just as definitey not somebody you would run into all over the place.  Most people had real jobs.  But in the mythic West of the movies the gunslinger becomes a man of adventure and danger.  He lives by the gun and dies by the gun.  He lives by a code and dies by that code too.  Shane gets a chance to live a normal life when he’s taken in by a farmer and his family.  He works on the farm as a hired hand and seems like he has a chance at happiness and a normal life. 

Of course it’s never that easy.  The nefarious ranchers hate the farmers and their plowed fields and fences.  Shane backs the farmer who’s courageous but not a fighter.  When the ranchers hire a gunslinger to enforce their will there’s only one way to beat him.  Shane must strap on his peacemaker and become a gunslinger again.  The template is repeated in plenty of movies.  Pale Rider, another Western, is pretty much the same story but so is Soldier a sci-fi flick with Kurt Russel.  You can substitute any job that’s not 9-5 and the story will work.  He could be a car thief (Gone in 60 Seconds), he could be a mountain rescuer (Cliffhanger), or he could even be a ping pong player (Balls of Fury).

There’s a couple of things that make this archetype modern.  One is the simple idea of retirement.  Heroes of ancient myth didn’t really retire.  They fought monsters and wars then they died and their death was usually a big part of their story.  They rarely got old.  Being a hero wasn’t really a job anyway which brings us to the second thing.  The modern idea that you can choose (or at least try to) who you are.  The fates of ancient heroes were set down before they were born.  The Retiree, whatever his life was until now, has a choice to be something different, something better.  Like The Assassin story a good Retiree story has redemption at it’s core.  Shane chose to face his fate as a gunslinger.  He gave up that life to protect it and that final sacrifice is usually the emotional punch in the best of these stories. 

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The New Archetypes: Part 3

By on August 16, 2010 ·
When Lego Ninja Attack...
Image by Neil Crosby via Flickr

Last time I talked about the Nobody.  Everybody has felt like a Nobody at some point which makes the Nobody a sort of everyman.  If you can’t root for him at least you can identify with him.  Before that was the Rogue Cop.  This guy (it’s almost always a guy) plays by his own rules but we know he’s the good guy.  But what if our good guy doesn’t do good things?  What if he’s a bad guy?  How can he still be the hero?  Why do we root for the modern Archetype of The Assassin?

Murder is by and large a bad thing, even in the violent make believe world of movies.  We the audience can’t seem to get enough killing though and the storytellers are always happy to oblige.  But that whole morality thing keeps popping up.  Even if it’s fiction some of us might feel guilty for cheering on killers.  Some of us might feel guilty enough to digitally alter (and not very well, I might add) a decades old iconic scene to make a cantina shooting look like self-defense.  So how do we make it okay for the hero to murder people in cold blood?  Simple.  We pay him lots and lots of money.  For some reason we love movies about assassins.  The Professional,  Assassins, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Grosse Pointe Blank, Wanted, La Femme Nikita/Point of No Return…that’s just off the top of my head but the list is pretty long.  So what is it about the Assassin?

Well for starters he’s cool.  I don’t know anything about the real world of assassins.  I don’t know if they’re cool or not but in the movies they’re cool.  They wear cool clothes and use cool weapons.  They have cool training sequences perhaps in a cool facility or in some secret ninja stronghold in the mountains.  They have cool moves for every situation; getting into and out of buildings, finding their targets and evading detection.  They remain cool under all kinds of pressure whether they’re being shot at or laying in wait for their targets.  Just laying in wait has to be cool.  You can’t just sit on a lawn chair with a deer rifle; you have to hang on to the chassis of a car or climb headfirst down a rope or…whatever.  Call it the Batman factor:  if you look cool enough it doesn’t matter how insane your actions are.

There has to be more to it though and I think there is.  It’s not just cool moves that are attractive but the power and freedom.  The Assassin strikes at will and without hesitation.  He has the power of life and death.  He’s free from moral judgement, at least from himself, because he’s only doing his job.  A plumber doesn’t feel guilty about snaking a drain.  Despite the fact these people are ending lives most of us wish we could operate so surely and powerfully.  We live by countless rules every waking moment and being free of those rules is a strong fantasy.  Of course there’s a price to pay and that’s humanity.

Humanity is the other side of the coin for the Assassin.  Most of these characters have either been stripped of their humanity through training or lost their connection to humanity from years of killing.  It’s the lack of morality and humanity that give the Assassin storytelling legs.  The assassin story is usually a redemption story.  Perhaps the Assassin never wanted the life he was in and has to find a way out (Point of No Return).  Perhaps there is an unexpected connection that makes the Assassin want to be human again (The Professional).  Sometimes the Assassin sees the effect he has on the rest of humanity and wants to make things right (The Killer).  Whatever the case the Assassin is usually trying to regain his lost humanity and we root for him to make it.  If a paid killer can find redemption than so can the rest of us.   

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